Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Converse The in the Hat
Converse is an American shoe company that has been making shoes, lifestyle fashion and athletic apparel since the early 20th century. Converse is one of the earliest pioneers in the sneaker and sporting good industry founded in 1908.
In his late 30s, Marquis Mill manufacturing firm, opened the Converse Rubber Shoe Company (unrelated to the Boston Rubber Shoe Company founded by fourth cousin Elisha Converse) in Malden, Massachusetts in February 1908. The company was a rubber shoe manufacturer, providing winterized rubber soled footwear for men, women, and children. By 1910, Converse was producing 4,000 shoes daily, but it was not until 1915 that the company began manufacturing athletic shoes for tennis.
The company's main turning point came in 1917 when the Converse All-Star basketball shoe was introduced. Then in 1921, a basketball player named Charles H. "Chuck" Taylor walked into Converse complaining of sore feet. Converse gave him a job. He worked as a salesman and ambassador, promoting the shoes around the United States, and in 1923 his signature was added to the All Star patch. He continued this work until shortly before his death in 1969.
Converse also customized shoes for the New York Renaissance (the "Rens"), the first all-African American professional basketball team.
Several special editions of Converse shoes have been made, including DC Comics, The Ramones, AC/DC the Sailor Jerry, Metallica, The Clash, Dr. Seuss, Grateful Dead, Ozzy Osbourne, Jimi Hendrix, Drew Brophy, Nirvana, and Gorillaz the Control, green, brown or camouflage edition, and the Danny Potthoff. Today stores like Footlocker have exclusive models and others personalise them for you on the go.
Three new designs were created for high tops, inspired by The Who. There is also a special collection released called 1Hund (red), where 15% of the profits are used to support HIV/AIDS relief. One hundred artists from around the world were chosen to create designs for the collection.
The Cat in the Hat is a children's book by Dr. Seuss and perhaps the most famous, featuring a tall, anthropomorphic, mischievous cat, wearing a tall, red and white-striped hat and a red bow tie. With the series of Beginner Books that The Cat inaugurated, Seuss promoted both his name and the cause of elementary literacy in the United States of America.[1] The eponymous cat appears in six of Seuss's rhymed children's books:
The Cat in the Hat
The Cat in the Hat Comes Back
The Cat in the Hat Song Book
The Cat's Quizzer
I Can Read with My Eyes Shut!
Daisy-Head Mayzie
Theodor Geisel, writing as Dr. Seuss, created The Cat in the Hat in response to the May 25, 1954, Life magazine article by John Hersey, titled "Why Do Students Bog Down on First R? A Local Committee Sheds Light on a National Problem: Reading." In the article, Hersey was critical of school primers:
In the classroom boys and girls are confronted with six books that have insipid illustrations depicting the slicked-up lives of other children. [Existing primers] feature abnormally courteous, unnaturally clean boys and girls. . . . In bookstores, anyone can buy brighter, livelier books featuring strange and wonderful animals and children who behave naturally, i.e., sometimes misbehave. Given incentive from school boards, publishers could do as well with primers.
Hersey’s arguments were enumerated over ten pages of Life magazine, which was a leading periodical in the U.S. at that time. After detailing many issues contributing to the dilemma connected with student reading levels, Hersey asked toward the end of the article:
Why should [school primers] not have pictures that widen rather than narrow the associative richness the children give to the words they illustrate — drawings like those of the wonderfully imaginative geniuses among children’s illustrators, Tenniel, Howard Pyle, "Theodor S. Geisel".
Ted Geisel's friend William Ellsworth Spaulding, who was then the director of Houghton Mifflin's education division, invited Geisel to dinner in Boston and "proposed that Ted write and illustrate such a book for six- and seven-year olds who had already mastered the basic mechanics of reading. 'Write me a story that first-graders can't put down!" [Spaulding] challenged."[2] Spaulding supplied Geisel with a list of 348 words that every six year old should know, and insisted that the book's vocabulary be limited to 225 words. Nine months later Dr. Seuss finished The Cat In The Hat, which used 223 words that appeared on the list plus 13 words that did not. Because Geisel was under contract with Random House, Houghton Mifflin retained the school rights to The Cat in the Hat and Random House retained the rights to trade sales.[2]
The story is 1629 words in length and uses a vocabulary of only 236 distinct words, of which 54 occur once and 33 twice. Only a single word – another – has three syllables, while 14 have two and the remaining 221 are monosyllabic. The longest words are something and playthings.
In an interview he gave in Arizona magazine in June 1981, Dr. Seuss claimed the book took nine months to complete due to the difficulty in writing a book from the 223 selected words. He added that the title for the book came from his desire to have the title rhyme and the first two suitable rhyming words that he could find from the list were "cat" and "hat". Dr. Seuss also regretted the association of his book and the "look say" reading method adopted during the Dewey revolt in the 1920s. He expressed the opinion that "... killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in the country."
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